ON KINSHIP DIPLOMACY
SO Japanese Prime Minister - dent Rodrigo Duterte “family.” Last year, in October, during Duterte’s detente mission in China, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told him “We are brothers. We are Asians.”
The use of kinship terms such as “family” and “brothers” harks back to the style diplomacy in our region before Europeans changed our interpolity dynamics by introducing Westphalian- style diplomacy. The Westphalian style of diplomacy is more impersonal and establishes relations between two separate states rather than establishes a kinship.
This diplomatic style is particularly prominent in the islands composing the archipelago we now call the Philippines. Kinship is an important principle in forming relations with another community. As historian Barbara Watson Andaya puts it in Political Development Between the Sixteenth and Eighteenth
Centuries, it is “the binding medium in the creation of bonds between communities…, usually formalized by a ceremony whereby two leaders accepted each other as brothers.”
As far as my research on our pre- colonial and indigenous style of diplomacy has taken me, two practices stand out:
sandugo ( blood oath) and seketas teel.
Sandugo was a very sacred politico- religious ritual. Blood oaths establishes a kinship bond which becomes the foundation of a trade relations, alliance, or a peace treaty. Those who enter a blood compact become “brothers”— of one blood. This ritual involves drinking each other’s blood mixed with alcohol, sworn to a deity. It’s a fusion higher than marriage and can only be broken by death, while marriage can be dissolved by divorce.
Blood oaths, as Andaya describes it, “transform the most distant stranger into a kinsman [ as] suggested in an early Spanish account of the Philippines.” The most famous blood oaths between foreigners and natives were between Ferdinand Magellan of Portugal and Rajah Humabon of Cebu; and Miguel Lopez de Legazpi and Datu Sikatuna of Bohol.
Mindoro Oriental holds a Sandugo Festival every April. Local historian Florante Villarica started the Sandugo Festival in Mindoro. It’s in honor of the age- old trade relationship between the Mangyans of Min- doro and the Chinese. Mindoro was one of the major ports in pre- colonial Philippines. And before the Spaniards came, the Chinese and the Mangyans have already been trading. Porcelains from the Sung, Yüan, and Ming periods have been found in the coasts of northern Mindoro.
The Tausug of Jolo call this blood oath, bagay magtaymañ
ghud. It’s either a ritual friendship sworn on the Koran between two friends who wanted to sanctify their friendship or as a peace treaty between two adversaries.
The seketas teel is a diplomatic ritual of establishing trade relations between the Maguindanaoan and the Teduray. Again, it’s expressed in terms of kinship.
The Teduray people live in the uplands of Cotabato in Mindanao, while the Maguindanaon people live in the lowlands. To establish tradepacts, the Teduray kefeduwan ( legal authority) and Maguindanaon datu would perform the seketas teel ritual or “cutting rattan together.”
During my master’s thesis research phase, anthropologist Stuart Schlegel e- mailed me a copy of “Teduray- Maguindanaon Ethnic Relations: An Ethnohistorical Puzzle,” a paper he presented at a conference in Cotabato City in 1971. He describes the ritual as follows:
The kefeduwan and datu “would each take hold of the end of a strip of a rattan and, laying the rattan upon a log, would chop it into two with a kris, while swearing to be ‘ as brothers’ –- to treat each other henceforth not as hostile but, for purposes of trade, as being ‘ of one father, one mother.”
Kinship style diplomacy has also a distinct style of conflict resolution. There’s a great emphasis on what I call the process of mending, which puts a great emphasis on the non- material dimensions of the dispute.
The foundation of any resolution is a restored kinship relationship. In other words, the parties must realize their kinship first. After that, they could proceed to ironing out the more material aspects of their conflict. Without the mending process, conflicts fester and the resolution rests on weak grounds.